Basu: Domestic violence factor overlooked in K.C. tragedy

Dec. 4, 2012

Members of the Kansas City Chiefs and Carolina Panthers pray together after their game at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., Sunday. The game was one day after a Chiefs player killed his girlfriend and himself. / Associated Press

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In the photo, probably taken on the 3-month-old’s first Thanksgiving, Zoey wears a T-shirt that proclaims her “Mommy’s little turkey.” A pretty, fresh-faced young woman cuddles her, smiling broadly.

Not two weeks later, Zoey’s mother is dead, murdered by the father, who went on to kill himself. Police say Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, multiple times after she came home late from a concert he didn’t think she should have attended. That’s though he himself had been out partying, and a friend said Perkins, 22, needed a break from the stress of caring for the baby — whom Belcher’s mother was looking after.

The arrogant brutality of taking an innocent woman’s life — no less, that of his lover, the mother of his child — was almost obscured in the news stories about the trauma of Belcher’s death on his team, and on the two witnesses. Random comments may have even left the impression that Belcher’s self-inflicted death was as tragic as Perkins’ murder, as if the latter act canceled out the heinousness of the former.

But on national online chats, advocates for battered women wished friends and sports officials had put more emphasis on domestic violence, observed Laurie Schipper, director of the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “For a good part of the weekend, the victim and her child appeared to be an afterthought, after the perpetrator and bystanders who witnessed his suicide,” she said.

Reporters dredged up Belcher’s ninth-grade English teacher, who recalled what a gentleman he was. People with no first-hand knowledge surmised that concussions or steroid use were involved and made the 25-year-old Belcher snap. The team chairman said Belcher had shown no signs of anything being wrong — though it turns out the Chiefs knew about the couple’s problems and provided counseling.

A cousin of Perkins’ from Texas said the relationship with Belcher wasn’t healthy and noted the stress of the baby, along with Belcher’s constant time away from home for practices and games.

His family has cautioned against assuming anything about the relationship. But no rewriting of history can negate the fact that though he was free — however tragically — to take his own life, Belcher had no right to take Perkins’.

Ironically, four years ago, while at the University of Maine, Belcher joined Male Athletes Against Violence, whose members pledge never to commit violence against women, to stand up against those who do, and to “look honestly at my actions in regards to violence and make changes, if necessary.” The very fact that there is such an initiative is a mark of progress in society’s approach to domestic violence. Other progress has come in the work of police, prosecutors and victims’ advocates.

But ultimately getting to the root of it takes more than signing a pledge. It takes really looking inside. In his post “Manhood, Football, and Suicide,” New York blogger Kevin Powell called Belcher “a man living in the supersized macho world of football, a world in which many of us American males reside, be it football or not. Too many of us have been taught manhood in a way that is not healthy.”

“Yes, they had been arguing, Belcher and his girlfriend,” wrote Powell on CNN.com, “but in my work as an activist, including around gender violence prevention, I’ve seen the tragic pattern across our nation of men who, in the heat of rage, have killed their girlfriends, wives or lovers, as if they had no other vocabulary or emotion to deal with the disagreement or the breakup.”

From Belcher’s teammates to Perkins’ relatives, everyone now has to figure out how to think of him and what he did. Eventually, so will Zoey. Maybe one answer is to think less about Belcher and more about Perkins. The Chiefs took a step by holding a moment of silence for domestic violence victims, without mentioning his name. They could go farther by naming something in honor of Kasandra Perkins, so her daughter grows up to know her mother had a life worth remembering.

There are other issues — stability before parenthood and a father’s role in parenting are two. But the most useful thing that can come from this horrendous story would be a men’s call to action about violence against women. One place to start is Iowaman.org, a project of Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which aims to “inspire all men of Iowa to partner with women to promote healthy and respectful relationships.”

If someone’s manhood is so fragile as to feel undermined when a woman shows the independence to attend a concert or needs a little space of her own, then that manhood itself needs redefining. It can be done.